Understand how structured data works

Try
our new Structured Data Codelab. This codelab walks you through adding several types of
structured data to a simple HTML site, including where to place structured data on a site and
how to validate it.

Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit
clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page.
Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying
the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking
time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page,
as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general. For example,
here is a JSON-LD structured data snippet that might appear
on the contact page of the Unlimited Ball Bearings corporation, describing their contact information:

Google Search also uses structured data to enable special search result features and
enhancements. For example, a recipe page with valid structured data is eligible to appear in
a graphical search result, as shown here:

Because the structured data labels each individual element of the recipe, users can search
for your recipe by ingredient, calorie count, cook time, and so on.

Structured data is coded using in-page markup on the page that the information applies to.
The structured data on the page should describe the content of that page. You should not create
blank or empty pages just to hold structured data; nor should you add structured data about
information that is not visible to the user, even if the information is accurate. For more technical
and quality guidelines, see the Structured data
general guidelines.

The Google Structured Data Testing Tool is an easy and useful
tool for validating your structured data, and in some cases, previewing a feature in Google Search.
Try it out:

Structured data format

This documentation describes which fields are required, recommended, or optional for structured data with special meaning to Google Search.
Most Search structured data uses schema.org
vocabulary, but you should rely on the documentation on developers.google.com as definitive
for Google Search behavior, rather than the schema.org documentation. Attributes or
objects not described here are not required by Google Search, even if marked as required
by schema.org.

You must include all the required properties for an object to be eligible for appearance in
Google Search with enhanced display. In general, defining more recommended features can make
it more likely that your information can appear in Search results with enhanced display.
However, it is more important to supply fewer but complete and accurate
recommended properties rather than trying to provide every possible recommended property with
less complete, badly-formed, or inaccurate data.

In addition to the properties and objects documented here, Google can make general use of the
sameAs property and other schema.org
structured data. Some of these elements may be used to enable future Search features, if they
are deemed useful.

JavaScript notation embedded in a <script> tag in the page head or body. The
markup is not interleaved with the user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier
to express, such as the Country of a PostalAddress of a MusicVenue of an Event.
Also, Google can read JSON-LD data when it is dynamically injected into the
page's contents, such as by JavaScript code or embedded widgets in your content
management system.

An open-community HTML specification used to nest structured data within HTML
content. Like RDFa, it uses HTML tag attributes to name the properties you want
to expose as structured data. It is typically used in the page body, but can be used in the head.

An HTML5 extension that supports linked data by introducing
HTML tag attributes that
correspond to the user-visible content that you want to describe for search engines. RDFa
is commonly used in both the head and body sections of the HTML page.

Structured data guidelines

Be sure to follow the general structured data guidelines, as well
as any guidelines specific to your structured data type; otherwise your structured
data might be ineligible for rich result display in Google Search.